Keeping York County first responders up and running during critical 911 paging system failure

Last month Everbridge successfully managed an incident in York County, PA involving a failure of their third-party 911 paging system. With a recent capacity increase of 200% and the introduction of the industry’s first elastic infrastructure model that can reach near infinite scale, we were able to quickly and efficiently alert key officials of the 911 system failure.

At around 1:42 pm on January 4th, the county-wide 911 paging system went down for a total of 90 minutes due to the failure of an essential computer component. This critical communication system is typically used to alert firefighters and first responders of emergencies that require their immediate attention or response.

Fire Chief Ira Walker of York County just received a report that the paging system might be down, minutes before the Everbridge alerts were successfully delivered to him via an automated phone call, confirming his suspicions. Almost immediately after he received the Everbridge alert, he was notified of a fire-alarm triggered incident, and was quickly on the road responding with other firefighters from his team. Despite the 911 paging system failure, the Everbridge system helped York County maintain its high standards for emergency and incident response times.

“During 2011 the system was used successfully 498 times for notifications.  Our office has found the Everbridge Aware Notification System to be a reliable method to get important information to our emergency responders in a fast, safe and secure manner,” said Michael Fetrow, Director, York County Office of Emergency Management.